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And now, in addition to everything else, her homeland was at war with her husband's, the two sides piling up corpses along their common border in an almost unprecedented frenzy; and, in addition to that, her husband was in misery about the work his firm was doing for the man who had started it all. If the urgencies of the world had once drawn her out of academe, its hor- rors now drove her back in: she threw herself into a second Ph.D. program, this time in sociology, at the University of Manchester, and she got her degree in less than two years. At the same time, she retreated into family life: she . , became pregnant, and Kanan sand her first child-a daughter, Bushra (the naD;1e means "good tidings" in Arabic )-was born in 1981; a son, Naseem, was born four years later. In any event, it was clear: to both Afsaneh and Kanan that it was past time to be cutting their ties to Makiya Associates. Kanan worked as quickly as he could, but it still took him over two years. He had to establish a board of directors to oversee the operations of the office (he retained a position on the board); he had to bring in new people; and, most important, he had to find someone who could take over his own day-to-day managing role and had to train that person in all its intricacies. Finally, in 1983, they did leave. They headed back to America and settled, for the time being, in a house in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where Kanan began work on a book. T HE seed for the book had actually been planted a couple of years earlier, in London, when one of Kanan's former Trotskyite colleagues, Neil Belton, who was then an editor at Verso-New Left Books, commis- sioned him to prepare what both of them thought was going to be "a quickie" -a straightforward report on Iraq that would "explain to people the peculiar intensity and violence of Iraqi nationalism," as Belton described it to me in London recently. Belton and Kanan had initially assumed that the manuscript would take about two years to write, and that its interpretation would be grounded in good, solid Marx- ist categories, such as competing class interests and the debilitating contin- gencies imposed on development by the capitalist world order. "It ended up taking quite a bit longer," Belton said. JANUARY 6,1992 "And, of course, what finally emerged was something very different from what we had expected." "So New Left Books came up with this offer," Emmanuel Farjoun re- calls. "A seemingly light commission for your standard, general program- matic overview. But Kanan's a serious guy. He read and he read. The book continued and the war continued. The whole scene in the Middle East got worse and worse. He discovered things as he went along, discovered the in- adequacy of his earlier way of looking at things-of our earlier way, because he ended up taking me with him. He was incredibly tenacious. And I think that a part of what was driving him was surely the shame he'd felt in working on those Iraqi commissions back in his father's office. He felt a deep guilt, and the book, in part, was his way of coming to terms with that." " Th ' . h " Af h ere s a great Irony ere, sane remarked to me one day. "Because the truth is that before 1980 Kanan hadn't been all that involved in Iraq. Leba- non and Palestine and, later, Iran were far more to the fore in what we were struggling over. But then it was as if the Baath came to him. If his father had not been invited back to Iraq, Kanan would probably never have written that book. It was his being involved, even tangentially, in designing the Baath Party headquar- ters that actually got him thinking, seriously thinking, about the Baath." And there was a further irony. Throughout his years of running his father's office, Kanan, who was in charge of setting everyone's salaries, had behaved as any self-respecting socialist would have under the circum- stances, and set his own salary ludi- crously low-even below that of the office secretary. When he was estab- lishing the board of directors to oversee things after his departure, however, he awarded himself a sizable stipend as a member of that board, in justifiable compensation, as he saw it, for all his years of undervalued service-a sort of pension. Thereafter, he would be getting a slice of the office's annual profits- enough, for example, to allow him to go off and write a book about Sad dam Hussein. In effect, Sad dam Hussein became not only the principal subject of Kanan's book but, unwittingly, its principal sponsor as well. Kanan felt that, with the exception of Afsaneh, Emmanuel, and a few